Dudek Revolutionizes Land Surveying with Drones and GIS Technology

To help clients with scheduling, designing, and permitting for their construction projects, Dudek, an environmental engineering consulting firm, uses geographic information system (GIS) technology to complete projects on time and within budget. Their clients work in a variety of industries like water utilities, energy, retail, conservation, education, and health care throughout North America. Combining drones with GIS was a new approach for staff at Dudek, and the main clients they identified as ideal for serving with this integration were those working on renewable energy projects.

“We did site planning, engineering, and evaluation to determine if a site was even viable for solar development,” said Steven Hochart, practice director at Dudek. “The faster those clients could get data, the faster they could submit their application to the local utilities to get their project in the queue…for them, it was all about speed. If we flew over a small site in the morning, the client could see the data by the afternoon.”

Dudek collected aerial imagery data with drones and analyzed it using GIS, then presented it to clients as a dynamic visualization. Everything from easements being plotted to topographic data is accessible on a near real time map of the project schedule.

In the past, Dudek had used multiple systems to plan flights and collect imagery data in the field. Initially, they used UgCS, unpiloted aerial vehicle (UAV) software for geophysical surveys. The data from the UAVs was stored on laptops and transferred to Dropbox, a file storage software with cloud storage, and eventually, the data was moved on to servers. Imagery processing was handled by Agisoft Metashape, a tool for photogrammetry, adding more complexities to Dudek’s previous workflow. This disjointed process was inefficient due to the lack of integration, and it was expensive because each system had its own costs associated with it. Additionally, traditional methods like helicopters and airplanes to survey land and collect imagery data were slow and costly. “We had to mobilize a plane if there weren’t any in the area. We had projects all over the country, and we don’t have our own planes, so we had to subcontract that work out,” said Hochart. 

Staff at Dudek recognized the need to streamline their operations to eliminate unnecessary steps and costs to get data to their customers faster. Through a product demonstration, Dudek’s staff was shown that Esri’s Site Scan for ArcGIS could find the optimal flight paths, as well as automate tasks that were previously manual, like uploading and processing data in the cloud to securely store imagery for analytics. Dudek saw Site Scan for ArcGIS as an opportunity to fix their fragmented workflow and decided to purchase the software. As an end-to-end, cloud-based drone mapping software, Site Scan has greatly modernized drone imagery collection, processing, and analysis. Staff at Dudek were already well acquainted with Esri’s software, so incorporating it into their existing GIS infrastructure was easy.

“For us, Site Scan is a very simple solution,” continued Hochart. “We have mobile teams using ArcGIS Field Maps, mappers using ArcGIS Pro, and our surveyors are using the Esri-AutoCAD (computer-aided design) connection to create a database for us.”

Now, with Site Scan fully integrated into their workflow, the staff uses Site Scan for flight planning, data collection, and processing. Additionally, the GIS team utilizes Site Scan for mapping and integrating GIS and CAD data to share with other staff and customers into a custom-built site called the Dudek Land Development Portal. The portal combines GIS and CAD data for faster, more informed decision-making, and real-time mapping of a project’s status.

Transitioning from previously outdated, disconnected systems to Site Scan to gather, organize, and analyze drone data, Dudek saved over $80,000 in one year. The new portal provided staff with an opportunity to put this innovation to work right away on landslide mitigation and emergency response in Hawaii. 

When heavy rainfall caused mud and trees to slide down the Pali Highway, known as Hawaii Route 61, in Oahu, access to roads in and out of town was blocked. A scenic 10-mile main thoroughfare, the Pali Highway connects downtown Honolulu to Kailua and sustains thousands of drivers’ worth of traffic during the morning commute alone. Dudek’s team jumped into action by using Site Scan quickly to collect, process, and share road conditions with government agencies to help them accomplish the task of unblocking this critical route. According to news reports, Department of Transportation crews removed 10 truckloads of mud and debris off the highway, careful not to destabilize the slope of the hill.

Dudek found this newfound efficiency particularly evident on smaller projects. Personnel could capture, process, and share imagery within a single day, impressing clients with quick turnaround times. “We do a lot of work with rockfall hazards,” said Hochart. “Captured with Site Scan, the clients love it because they get a dynamic 3D view where they can pan around, zoom in, and get an understanding of [the site].”

Now that staff at Dudek are leveraging Site Scan, and their crews are comfortable with how GIS software and drones easily integrate, leadership is looking to the future and exploring more ways to serve clients and transform the land surveying industry. Dudek is actively reaching out to similar firms in sectors like the civil engineering field to demonstrate how they implement GIS and drone technology together, all in a cloud-based system. 

“We weren’t shipping hard drives around [the US], waiting for things to upload or sitting in a hotel dealing with VPN issues,” continued Hochart. “For the land surveying industry, this is a big deal.”

Additionally, Dudek hopes to advance the land surveying industry by including more aspects of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) into their workflows. GeoAI combines AI with GIS, giving maps and other spatial tools capabilities like automated data processing and even predictive analysis. For land surveyors, GeoAI can be leveraged to model and manage potential disasters by analyzing historical data and terrain information.

We fly a site anywhere from 5 to 2,000 acres, creating planimetric data for those sites,” said Hochart. Planimetric data provides crucial information about the measurement and mapping of the locations and shapes of roads, buildings, rivers, and other landmarks as they appear from an aerial view. “Having the ability to use GeoAI within the GIS system helps us streamline the creation of our planimetric and basic image segmentation to integrate with CAD and BIM systems later on.” 

Once Dudek’s surveyors gather all the data needed with Site Scan, they can create and share a digital twin in a single view on ArcGIS GeoBIM. Combining the spatial analysis capabilities of GIS with detailed 3D design and construction data, these digital twins are dynamic virtual representations of reality that provide contextual understanding of built environments. 

In one example, Dudek collected imagery data for wastewater utilities by using a UAV to fly street corridors. In the past, they would send mobile surveyors to collect GPS data from sewer lines and water meters. This approach was inherently risky because staff had to walk along roadsides to access the water system. Now, with GeoAI and digital twins, drone data and GIS workflows are easily integrated within the utility network schema. 

Hochart noted that this new approach streamlines operations for civil engineers, GIS users, and site designers from the very beginning. Dudek is leading the way for the industry in revolutionizing the collection and processing of data-rich imagery with drones using GIS technology throughout the entire life cycle of a project. “That first image of a site sets the foundation for any future planning.”